Bittorrent
If you’ve spent any amount of time browsing the internet in the past half-decade, you’ll probably have heard about BitTorrent, a popular program used for downloading media. Whether or not you know how to use it is another thing altogether. I’m here to tell you that it’s invaluable and to show you how to get started with it.
Disclaimer: BitTorrent is an entirely legal program and infrastructure. Downloading copyrighted material through it is not. If you follow my instructions here, you will have done something wholly illegal and morally reprehensible. Good people pay for their media. If you don’t intend on downloading copyrighted material, BitTorrent is still extremely useful, as it is a powerful method of distributing legal information. Even if you don’t ever plan to use it at all, I still recommend you internalize what I lay out here, because this system is changing the world.
I, the author, am not responsible for any damage you incur in relation to this piece of writing.
A Bit of History The seminal Napster hit its peak usage with roughly 25 million users in mid-2001. At this exact same time, Bram Cohen produced the BitTorrent protocol and first client. Since then, BitTorrent’s uptake has been exponential. In 2006, an estimated 35% of the world’s aggregate internet bandwidth was reported to have been being used for BitTorrent traffic. More than every third bit travelling across the world was being used specifically in these programs, and this number has only been on an incline since then. Now, even commercial companies like Blizzard (the creators of Starcraft and Warcraft) use BitTorrent to dispense software updates. To say that BitTorrent is the new Napster is massively underestimating its impact. Torrents represent a sea change in electronic information transfer.
A Torrent of Technical Details
BitTorrent is a means of distributing large amounts of data from one computer to another to many, many others. It differs from client-server downloads (the
Disclaimer: BitTorrent is an entirely legal program and infrastructure. Downloading copyrighted material through it is not. If you follow my instructions here, you will have done something wholly illegal and morally reprehensible. Good people pay for their media. If you don’t intend on downloading copyrighted material, BitTorrent is still extremely useful, as it is a powerful method of distributing legal information. Even if you don’t ever plan to use it at all, I still recommend you internalize what I lay out here, because this system is changing the world.
I, the author, am not responsible for any damage you incur in relation to this piece of writing.
A Bit of History The seminal Napster hit its peak usage with roughly 25 million users in mid-2001. At this exact same time, Bram Cohen produced the BitTorrent protocol and first client. Since then, BitTorrent’s uptake has been exponential. In 2006, an estimated 35% of the world’s aggregate internet bandwidth was reported to have been being used for BitTorrent traffic. More than every third bit travelling across the world was being used specifically in these programs, and this number has only been on an incline since then. Now, even commercial companies like Blizzard (the creators of Starcraft and Warcraft) use BitTorrent to dispense software updates. To say that BitTorrent is the new Napster is massively underestimating its impact. Torrents represent a sea change in electronic information transfer.
A Torrent of Technical Details
BitTorrent is a means of distributing large amounts of data from one computer to another to many, many others. It differs from client-server downloads (the